ellow-citizens and honorable to yourself gives a sure
pledge of the sincerity with which the avowed objects of the negotiation
will be pursued on your part, and we earnestly pray that similar
dispositions may be displayed on the part of France. The differences
which unfortunately subsist between the two nations can not fail in
that event to be happily terminated. To produce this end, to all so
desirable, firmness, moderation, and union at home constitute, we are
persuaded, the surest means. The character of the gentlemen you have
deputed, and still more the character of the Government which deputes
them, are safe pledges to their country that nothing incompatible with
its honor or interest, nothing inconsistent with our obligations of good
faith or friendship to any other nation, will be stipulated.

We learn with pleasure that our citizens, with their property, trading
to those ports of St. Domingo with which commercial intercourse has been
renewed have been duly respected, and that privateering from those ports
has ceased.

With you we sincerely regret that the execution of the sixth article of
the treaty of amity, commerce, and navigation with Great Britain, an
article produced by a mutual spirit of amity and justice, should have
been unavoidably interrupted. We doubt not that the same spirit of amity
and the same sense of justice in which it originated will lead to
satisfactory explanations, and we hear with approbation that our
minister at London will be immediately instructed to obtain them. While
the engagements which America has contracted by her treaty with Great
Britain ought to be fulfilled with that scrupulous punctuality and good
faith to which our Government has ever so tenaciously adhered, yet no
motive exists to induce, and every principle forbids us to adopt, a
construction which might extend them beyond the instrument by which they
are created. We cherish the hope that the Government of Great Britain
will disclaim such extension, and by cordially uniting with that of the
United States for the removal of all difficulties will soon enable the
boards appointed under the sixth and seventh articles of our treaty
with that nation to proceed and bring the business committed to them
respectively to a satisfactory conclusion.

The buildings for the accommodation of Congress and of the President and
for the public offices of the Government at its permanent seat being
in such a state as to admit of a removal to